


Enthrall

by cecilantro



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 14:47:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14771678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cecilantro/pseuds/cecilantro
Summary: Caleb just wants something to focus on to drown out the rest of his thoughts.Molly is pretty sure he can help.





	Enthrall

**Author's Note:**

> Why don't you check out my [Critical Role Daily Art Project](https://zemniannights.tumblr.com/) too?

Caleb is sick of the memories. They push extra hard at the rubber walls of his mind every time he casts and leaves a streak of fire-bright on the backs of his own eyelids.   
The little bits are the worst, he thinks, when it’s been a while between the big flashbacks and he’s forgotten how debilitating they are. The bits that come up everywhere, the way the light of the lamp looks on the wall of his inn room, the boisterous way that Beau laughs, just little things. The things that blur the present into his memories like mixing colours and for a second the red and blue become purple and Caleb sees his history sprawled in front of him as plain as the text on a page.   
It sucks. And it hurts. And he hates it, he wants to think of something, anything else, and  _ only _ that, even if just for a little while. A minute. Seconds, even. He’ll take  _ anything _ .   
Molly draws up beside him as they trudge along the road, wandering about thirty feet behind the cart. They can see, from this distance, Beau sat to guide the horses, and Yasha leaning up against the side behind her, they chatter amicably. Nott is scouting out ahead on Toilet, and Jester is currently sprawled over Fjord’s legs, asleep. Whilst Fjord would, generally, be a little iffy with the situation if Jester was awake, he seems calm enough, flicking through  _ Tusk Love _ playing catch-up, he’s the only one that hasn’t read it yet.   
(For good reason- Jester’s been having too much fun teasing and keeping it out of his reach. When she’s asleep is the only time he gets the chance to read it.)   
Last Molly checked, Fjord was about halfway through, just after a particularly terrible scene about an interrupted quickie.    
It had been a fun night for Molly.   
But cut to the present, the tiefling slings an arm around Caleb’s shoulders, it’s enough of a distraction that Caleb jumps and jolts.   
“Oh! Mollymauk!” He exclaims, almost accusatory in nature, and Molly chuckles. He’d pull his arm back, but Caleb isn’t shrinking away the way he usually does, in fact, he’s leaning into Molly. And so, Molly obliges, and pulls him in a little tighter.   
Caleb lifts an arm around Molly’s waist, and that’s new.   
They walk along like this for a while, awkward jolting and pulling with no desire on either half to pull away.   
“Something is wrong, Caleb.” Molly says, quiet enough that Caleb can choose to ignore it if he isn’t up to talking about it. There’s a long stretch of silence, and Molly simmers down to assuming that Caleb has, in fact, chosen to ignore it. That he’s not up to it. It’s nothing new for Caleb, and Molly squeezes the arm around his shoulders a little harder.   
“Something is wrong.” Caleb answers, almost two whole, silent minutes later. It shocks Molly, a little bit, but he turns fractionally to him to gauge his emotions from the corner of his eye.   
“Anything I can help with?” Molly offers, open and warm, and Caleb smiles wryly.   
“I don’t think so, you cannot control the way that my brain works.” Caleb tilts until he can rub his head against Molly’s arm, very similar to the way Frumpkin does when he needs love and attention. It makes Molly chuckle,   
“You picked the right familiar, hm?”   
“I am not sure if I have picked the behaviours up from him, or if I chose a cat for my own behaviours, if I am honest.”    
Molly leans, awkwardly, over to brush his cheek carefully against the top of Caleb’s head, though it ends up more to the side that he was aiming for. It’s a difficulty to keep his horns from knocking skull, but he’s determined.   
“As for fiddling with your thoughts, though, I  _ might _ be able to do something about it. It depends on what you need.”   
Caleb hums, confused, and Molly grins, makes sure Caleb’s watching when he carefully licks at his lip.   
“Ah.” Caleb hums, understanding, “Devil’s tongue.”   
“Dead on.” Molly’s grin widens fractionally, and Caleb falls to silence as he thinks about it.   
Beau turns back to call over her shoulder,   
“Light’s goin’! We’re gonna find a place t’ stop, Caleb, could you Message Nott and see what she’s found?”   
Caleb huffs but calls back a wordless affirmation, forced, finally, to pull away and out from the warm weight of Mollymauk, who watches him in adoration. Caleb unravels a thin piece of copper wire from its coil around his wrist and pulls it to his mouth, aims in roughly the direction of Nott,   
“ _ Beauregard asks if you’ve found anywhere to set up camp for the night? You can reply to this message. _ ”   
He smiles for the last bit, it’s an unnecessary addition but it’s like religion now, they both add it to every Message they send.   
He waits around thirty seconds to see if he can get a reply, and receives nothing. Well, it’s been a while since he was tracking her, he turns to the other side and points off of the road and says the same. This time, it takes Nott around ten seconds to reply,   
“ _ There’s a couple of trees about a hundred feet ahead! I can see the cart, off the left side of the road! _ ” Her voice echoes in his ears, and he repeats her message, aloud, to Beau.   
“A’ight, cool. Hey, Fjord, wake Jester up? She’s cookin’ tonight.”   
Fjord groans as he pushes Jester, carefully, off of his lap and lets her thud to the cart. She yelps, and Beau begins to pull the cart to the side, bumping them around.   
“Y’okay, Jes’?” She calls over her shoulder, and Yasha leans over to help pick her up, tugs her by the collar until she’s sitting. Molly and Caleb trail, thirty feet behind.   
Molly brushes his fingers down Caleb’s arm.   
Caleb takes his hand.

 

“Mollymauk.” Caleb says softly, careful not to wake the others. They’re all well-fed and warm and huddled into their bedrolls, save Yasha and Jester, who are on the other side of the fire. Molly and Caleb are bedded down, side-by-side, so that when Molly opens his eyes at his name, he’s face-to-face with Caleb. The wizard has an almost unnatural ability to have the most beautiful, sky-blue eyes, even in the midnight darkness.   
“Caleb?” Molly whispers back, when Caleb doesn’t continue, and draws a hand up and out of his blankets to offer it to him.   
Caleb mimics, threads his fingers between Molly’s and lets out a breath that shakes as though he’s been crying.   
“Are you alright there?” Molly asks, concerned suddenly, and Caleb smiles sickly,   
“I- well, no worse than I usually am. I was, ah-” he shakes his head, and goes to back out again, and Molly squeezes his fingers.   
“What can I do to help?”   
Caleb is quiet for a moment, draws out the time by pulling their clasped hands closer and kissing Molly’s fingers. He can’t see the way that Molly flushes, deep red-violet, but Molly can feel his face burning in response, for sure.   
“You- you said, that you may be able to help? With- with the way that my mind… gets too much. And too scattered.”   
“What do you need?” Molly doesn’t hesitate in asking, and Caleb feels a rush of sudden affection for him, all over again, like being caught under a waterfall.   
“You can cast, once a day, the  _ Enthrall _ spell,  _ ja _ ?”   
Molly hums, thinking,   
“Which one is that? What does it do?”   
“It- it makes it very hard to focus on anything other than you.”   
“ _ Oh _ , that one.” Molly smiles widely, “They all have these odd names, and I never remember them.”   
“If they are just things that you  _ do _ , I suppose you wouldn’t need to name them.” Caleb muses, and Molly nods his agreement,   
“I haven’t used that today, I don’t think?”   
“The only time I have seen you use it was, hm…” He stops to think, “on, on the crocodiles.”   
“Then I can certainly give it a shot, if you’re certain. It only lasts a minute, though, and you’ll be focused on  _ me _ .”   
Caleb smiles, his exhaustion is apparent in the lines of his face, and Molly feels his heart… break. A little bit.   
“That is the  _ ideal _ focus, Mollymauk.”   
Molly smiles back, the loving, affectionate smile that crinkles his eyes at the corners.   
“Don’t make any decisions until it’s over.” Molly’s smile is warm, his tone is serious, “ I need your word on that, Caleb.”   
“I won’t make any decisions until I have control of my own thoughts.” Caleb promises, squeezes Molly’s fingers, and he watches Molly fill his lungs.   
And begin to talk.   
Caleb hears the first sentence, along the lines of “That’s it, darling, just keep your eyes on me. Just me, that’s all that matters right now…” And then it begins to fuzz, and Caleb’s vision tunnels to a pinprick of  _ Molly. _ Molly is all that he can think of, everything that fills his mind, corner-to-corner, and nothing else exists. He’s aware of Molly’s fingers between his own, he’s aware of the way Molly’s mouth is moving and the exact shade of red that Molly’s eyes are, even though he can only just make them out in the darkness. His mind helpfully blocks in the colours that he can’t see right now, the purple and the dark of his hair, Caleb finds that he  _ really _ wants to comb his fingers through Molly’s ponytail.   
He’s sure that Molly’s hair would be soft, and silky, and wants to know how the crinkles and waves would feel between his fingers.   
Molly is still talking, there’s a sheen of sweat over him, a mark of how much concentration this is taking. How long has it been? Caleb can’t remember anything before this moment, can’t remember anything other than Molly.   
And then the world opens up again.   
Molly gasps for breath, and Caleb tugs his hand from Molly’s to stroke the tiefling’s damp hair back from his face.   
“Thank you.” Caleb murmurs, cups Molly’s jaw and brushes his thumb back and forth over Molly’s cheek, “Thank you. That was- that was exactly what I needed.”   
Molly smiles, and it’s his turn to look thoroughly exhausted.   
“Did you hear any of it? You went a little distant after the first couple of seconds.”   
“The first couple of sentences, yes, after that it all faded into one hum. What were you saying?”   
Molly waits to answer, tilts and turns his head until he can kiss the inside of Caleb’s wrist. He pauses there, for a second, just to feel the butterfly flicker of Caleb’s pulse against his lips.   
“I went through a list of the things that I love about you.” Molly says, and there’s almost a sense of nervousness behind it. Caleb chuckles,   
“I’m surprised that you could find a minutes worth of things. There is not a lot to compliment.”   
“I wasn’t even a quarter of the way through the list.” Molly replies, and this is sharp, firm, he reaches across to Caleb and balls his fist in the front of his shirt, “Do you not understand, Caleb?”   
“Understand?” Caleb asks, breathless, as Molly tugs him slowly closer.   
And closer.   
“Do I have to say it in Zemnian before you’ll get it through your thick skull?”   
And closer.   
“What?” Caleb asks, still breathless, and growing ever more so with each second, and  _ closer _ , Caleb finds his face less than an inch from Molly’s, he can feel the warmth of his breath.   
“ _ Ich liebe dich _ .” Molly says, at last, and Caleb’s eyes widen in the split second before the rest of his body reacts and he lurches forward and kisses Molly, not a thought about it.   
Molly is warm, most of the time, but the kiss is hot, even painfully so, the sweetest burn that Caleb has ever received.   
Molly laughs when Caleb draws back and splutters through breathless apologies,   
“If I’d known that  _ Zemnian _ was your turn-on, I’d have learnt it long ago.”   
“How- who told- how do you know that, that phrase?”   
“Nott.” Molly shrugs and smiles, “Something she’s picked up from you, I had to buy her silence, though. Had to wait for the right time.”   
Caleb’s head spins a little at the comprehension.   
“I- I never learned, I’m sorry-”   
“Shh.” Molly hushes, and kisses him silent, “It’s fine. It’s okay, darling, I promise. Go on, go back to sleep.”   
  
It’s mid-morning, next, when Caleb grabs Molly’s sleeve and pulls him aside. He’s spent the better part of his time this morning with Jester, and he pins Molly to a tree, makes sure he can’t move.   
“Mollymauk,” He says, half a gasp, and then, in Infernal, “ _ I love you _ .”   
Molly surges down and kisses him hard.   
“I love you too.”


End file.
